1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a pick-and-place head device for handling electronic components, and more particularly to a pick-and-place head device with a pushing mechanism in order to avoid the failure of releasing an electronic component on a pre-determined position.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the semiconductor device production process, the wafer test process is performed before the wafer dicing process by an automatic test equipment (ATE) to ensure the quality of electrical characteristics of the semiconductor device. After the wafers are divided into dies, a die sorter is used to pick up and place the dies on trays. The die sorter needs to handle thousands pieces of dies per hour. Especially, when the dies are small-sized and lightweight, the pick-and-place head device of the die sorter has great effects on the efficiency of the test process.
FIG. 1A and FIG. 1B show the perspective and cross-sectional views of a conventional pick-and-place head device, respectively. The conventional pick-and-place head 100 includes an air pressure joint 110, a suction member 120 and a main body member 130. The main body member 130 has an air passage 131. The air passage 131 has two openings, one opening of the air passage 131 is connected to the air pressure joint 110, and the other opening is connected to the suction member 120. The air pressure joint 110 is connected to a pressure source (not shown) having a pressure controller (not shown). When the pressure source is in negative pressure condition, the suction member 120 can pick up a die (not shown) via suction because the negative pressure is transferred to the suction member 120 through the air passage 131. And when the pressure source is in positive pressure condition, the die is then released from the suction member 120. Thus the pick-and-place head 100 can achieve the purpose of picking and placing a die by the control of the pressure source.
The pick-and-place head 100 mentioned above has only one air passage 131, and achieves the purpose of picking and placing a die by the control of a single pressure source. However, as the die has smaller size and lighter weight, when using the pick-and-place head mentioned above, the die frequently fails to be released from the suction member 120 onto the pre-determined position on a tray, because the speed of pressure control is not fast enough. This phenomenon will cause the failure of handling the die or the die will land on a wrong position. Increasing the amount of air allowed to increase the speed of pressure control may result in a risk to blow the adjacent dies placed on the tray to wrong positions or to blow the dies to flip over. When stacking the trays, the lack of precision position control may cause the damage of the dies.
For the reason that there are some disadvantages of the conventional pick-and-place head mentioned above, a need has arisen to propose a novel pick-and-place head to solve the failure of picking up and releasing a die because the speed of pressure control is not fast enough or the amount of air allowed by the pressure control is excessive. The novel pick-and-place head is also capable of improving the efficiency of picking up and releasing a die and suitable for picking up and releasing a similar electronic component which has small size and light weight.